clap/examples/escaped-positional.md
Ed Page 9b23a09f7a fix(help): Don't rely on ALL CAPS for headers
I see them fulfilling two roles
- A form of bolding
- As a callback to their placeholder in usage

However, it is a bit of an unpolished look and no other CLI seems to do
it.  This looks a bit more proefessional.  We have colored help for
formatting and I think the sections relation to usage will be clear
enough.
2022-08-26 10:21:18 -05:00

1.3 KiB

This requires enabling the [cargo feature flag][crate::_features].

You can use -- to escape further arguments.

Let's see what this looks like in the help:

$ escaped-positional --help
clap [..]
A simple to use, efficient, and full-featured Command Line Argument Parser

Usage:
    escaped-positional[EXE] [OPTIONS] [-- <SLOP>...]

Arguments:
    <SLOP>...    

Options:
    -f               
    -p <PEAR>        
    -h, --help       Print help information
    -V, --version    Print version information

Here is a baseline without any arguments:

$ escaped-positional
-f used: false
-p's value: None
'slops' values: []

Notice that we can't pass positional arguments before --:

$ escaped-positional foo bar
? failed
error: Found argument 'foo' which wasn't expected, or isn't valid in this context

Usage:
    escaped-positional[EXE] [OPTIONS] [-- <SLOP>...]

For more information try --help

But you can after:

$ escaped-positional -f -p=bob -- sloppy slop slop
-f used: true
-p's value: Some("bob")
'slops' values: ["sloppy", "slop", "slop"]

As mentioned, the parser will directly pass everything through:

$ escaped-positional -- -f -p=bob sloppy slop slop
-f used: false
-p's value: None
'slops' values: ["-f", "-p=bob", "sloppy", "slop", "slop"]